Personal Improvement

If you were handed a million dollars, how would you live the next year? After you bought a new car, maybe a big house, gave some money to charity, and so forth, how would you spend your time if money were no object and you had complete freedom to do what you want?

Would you quit your job?

Would you move to another state?

If you had no need to work for a living and could do whatever you like with your days, how would you plan and use your time? This is really important, so please take a few minutes to be honest with yourself.

If you still find yourself crunching the numbers, wondering if a million would really set you free, make it ten million. The point of this exercises is: What would your life look like in terms of your regular activity, lifestyle, and commitments if were 100% free from any financial or work-related stress?

Create a detailed vision that reflects your answer. Ideally you’ll write this down.

And once you know what you would do if time and money were not pressing concerns, you’ll need to answer my next question:

Why aren’t you already doing all the things you want to do right now?

Understandably you might not immediately be able to invest in your $300,000 dream car. But remember, this million dollar question is really about your daily work, activities, and lifestyle.

So if your first answer was “I’d quit my job”, I think it’s only right to ask yourself why you’re keeping a job you obviously don’t like.

Especially in the U.S., and from what I can tell in many other places as well, people suffer their entire lives under the burden of obligation. They work a crappy job they hate because they need money to live on, or they get married because their parents tell them it’s sinful to have a mate who isn’t under contract.

It’s both amazing and sad what people are willing to put themselves through in the name of obligation. According to Dr. Nick Hall, an alarming number of med students openly admit during their final years of training that they have little or no desire to be doctors; they are committing their entire lives to a career their parents wanted for them!

The same kind of perverse nonsense can be seen in most military academies or basic training depots. Many people join the armed forces because their fathers and grandfathers served, and they have been pressured since childhood to do the same.

On a less dramatic scale, how many people do you know who have told you hundreds of times how badly they hate their jobs, and yet they keep going back! Maybe you’re in a similar situation yourself.

Think about how crazy this is.

There is tremendous social pressure to think and act in a manner consistent with some vague idea of what it means to be a “good citizen”. As a result, millions (billions?) of people are going through the motions of life, dead in every sense  of the word long before their heart stops beating.

Look again at the things you said you’d do with a million dollars. Compare this to your current life and demand of yourself a good answer for why you should keep leading a life that’s not what you want.

As I’ve said many times before, heaven and reincarnation are both fine ideas but there is no proof of either. This could be your only shot at being you, so I urge you strongly to make the most of the experience!

People make such a big, dramatic deal of small decisions like leaving a job or ending an unhappy marriage. Honestly if someone is that determined to suffer I guess they’re entitled to their misery.

But because most people actively complain about the negative circumstances in their life I am compelled as a writer to continuously make these simple points:

1. Life is about being happy right now. Waiting to have a fulfilling life is ludicrous and depraved.
2. You should be living from your true values, and not by principles that please other people.
3. Finding your life’s purpose is mission critical #1. From their it’s all fun and games!

To be fair, I realize many of my readers are already living on purpose and doing exactly what they want. So please don’t take this post as condescending in any way.

I believe most of us, even when we are living our bliss, can benefit from the “million dollar question” exercise. I play a variation of this little game with myself often just to be sure I’m on track.

The version I use is called the “magic wand game”. I ask myself: if I could wave a magic wand over every area of my life and have things exactly as I want them, what would the results look like?

This helps me be certain I’m not settling for “reasonable” or “realistic”, and that I’m indeed pursuing my heart’s inspiration. I hope this concept resonates strongly with you, and that you’ll find ways to enhance your life using questions and games of this nature.

I’ve always admired the work of Brian Tracy, and I intend to share his insights often with readers of this blog. In the following article Tracy shares the five basic ways to become wealthy and tells you which method is the best.

The Five Roads to Financial Success in America and How to Choose Your Own

There are basically five ways that you can become wealthy starting with nothing in America based on over 25 years of research into American millionaires. Number one, you can inherit it. Less than 10 percent of wealthy Americans inherited any of their money, and it’s less and less every single year.

The Second Way

The second way that you can become wealthy is you can achieve it professionally. You can become a doctor or a lawyer or an architect or an accountant. You can become extremely good at what you do, be paid very well, and hold on to the money.

The Third Way

The third way you can achieve it is you can become a senior executive of a large corporation. You can be highly paid; you can have stock options and bonuses. And if you stay with the company long enough, for enough years, you can be paid enough to become wealthy.

The Fourth Way

You can win it. But only a tiny fraction of one percent of wealthy Americans got that way by winning their money some way or another. As a matter of fact, the odds against you winning the lottery are the equivalent of lightning striking twice in the same place. They’re millions and millions to one.

The Best Way

The fifth way that you can become wealthy is you can start your own business and earn it all by yourself. Starting your own business has been and will always be the high road to becoming wealthy for most self-made millionaires. Entrepreneurship in America offers more opportunities and opens more doors than all other possibilities put together. This is why it has been said that if you have the ability to start your own business and you don’t do it, you are a fool. I’ll repeat that. If you have the ability to start your own business and you don’t do it, you’re a fool.

Where do you start?

You start by getting your finances under control. The very first thing you do is you make a decision to get your finances under control. Some years ago, a man named George Classon wrote a book called The Richest Man in Babylon. It’s a classic on financial success and what Classon said in that book was that the key to becoming wealthy is to pay yourself first. Take ten percent off your earnings, off your gross income every month and put it aside. Learn to live on ninety percent or less of your gross income. So the very first thing that you do is you begin to save your money.

Action Exercises

Now, here are two things you can do immediately to put yourself onto the high road to personal wealth:

First, resolve today to begin saving your money a little bit at a time. Set a goal to save 10% of your earnings, to put it away and to never touch it. This will change your life.

Second, immediately register your own business or sole proprietorship. Open a bank account, get business cards and letterhead and create the corporate entity under which you can do business. Your business opportunities will appear far sooner than you think. If you build it, they will come.

For more priceless wealth building insights from Brian Tracy, plus the opportunity to win $500 be sure to click the book image now.

I highly recommend anything in Brian Tracy’s catalog, from print books and audio courses to DVD presentations, multi-media home study course, and full-blown personal consultation. This personal development expert has been studying millionaires and business success for the past 25 years, and therefore has a wealth of innovative strategies and techniques to share.

True personal development is a process, not an event.

In today’s fast food society people demand instant solutions to problems they have created through poor thinking and sorry habits over the course of many years. Furthermore very few people who claim to want change actually want any such thing.

The sad reality is most people want the benefits of change handed to them right now, and without any effort required on their part. As a writer in the personal development field it’s difficult to be compassionate and understanding when so many people have an absolutely infantile idea of what it means to improve the self.

Obviously most readers of this blog are a cut above weak-minded, mainstream thinking.

It’s important that we always recognize that any change or improvement will be a multi-part process. We can experience great quantum leaps where we appear to literally jump from one state of being into an entirely new and improved state, but this normally occurs after significant revelation and a genuine  paradigm shift.

Whether we’re looking to lose weight, hone our listening skills, make more money, or control our temper, what we are really expressing is the desire to evolve, and to become a better human being.

It is for this reason that people often continue their quest for personal development long after they’ve attained the initial goal that brought them into the field of literature. Most of us find very quickly that our innermost desire is to be our personal best and expand into a new self who is far greater than anything we previously imagined possible.

Personal improvement, or personal development if you prefer, is a lifelong journey that never ends. The joy and the triumph are in the constant learning and growth.